There were books everywhere—stacked on the floor, bowing shelves on the wall, sitting open and half-read on every flat surface. And where there weren’t books, there were papers and specimen boxes and glossy photographs of magical artifacts.
“Does it always look like this?” Tiana asked.
“A bit messy for your tastes?” Harrison grinned at her.
“How can you find anything in here?” Des lifted up a stack of papers and found an old sandwich with exactly one bite taken out of it.
“I have a system. And honestly it usually looks much better than this.” He ran a hand through his stupidly perfect hair and Tiana’s heart thumped hard in her chest and for a solid thirty seconds she couldn’t hear anything but her own heartbeat.
“What was that?” Tiana asked.
“Miss Sterling, are you not listening?”
Des snorted. “He said he’s been obsessed with a new artifact.”
“It was found by two brothers in Lawrence, Kansas and they brought it to me. It’s a jeweled broach but I haven’t been able to identify the jewel.”
“Can we see it?” Tiana asked, moving aside a pile of books and sitting on the sofa.
“What did it do? If they brought it to you, it must be some bad mojo.” Des leaned against the wall. Today she was wearing a black suit and tie with a white shirt and her usual stompy boots. Her hair hung loose and framed her round face.
Harrison had ditched his jacket, but he still wore the brown dress slacks of academia, only now with a brown vest over a gray shirt. The gray exactly matched the flecks in his eyes.
“That’s the thing, I’m not sure what it does. No one is. But it conclusively emanates some arcane energies and generally gives people the creeps.” Harrison flipped through stacks of papers until he found a photo of the broach and handed it to Tiana.
His fingers brushed hers and the heat went up several notches in the room. Did he do it on purpose? Was it an accident? Was it a subconscious accident? Tiana’s mind raced. He sat close to her on the sofa and the heat from his body drew her like a magnet.
Up close she could see the exhaustion in his face. He was hiding it well—perhaps with a glamour and a brave smile—but she’d spent enough time in office hours studying his warm brown eyes and well-shaped nose and full lips to recognize the signs.
“The photo?” Harrison said, raising an eyebrow at her.
Tiana blinked. Was she staring at him? She’d been staring at him. “Right. Yes. The photo.” It was of a broach that looked like a piece of costume jewelry. It had gold settings with a crown motif and an emerald as big as an egg.
“You think that diamond is haunting you?” Des asked.
“Diamond?” Harrison asked. “What do you see, Miss Sterling?”
“An emerald.”
“And I see an opal.” Harrison removed more photos from a teetering pile of papers. “Everyone sees a different gem and we haven’t been able to find a connection yet. They aren’t birthstones or blood-type related or anything else we’ve gleaned.” He handed the other photos out.
“I still see diamonds,” Des said. “In all of these.”
Something clicked. “The mountings change,” Tiana said. “In the first photo, the border motif is a crown but here it’s like tiny gold leaf trees.”
“And this one looks like mountains,” Des added.
“Currently, the border of the broach shows the campus buildings of Penrose. But it changes.”
“I don’t understand this at all,” Des said. “I’m one of the best enchanters on campus. No, in all of Canada and half the states. And I don’t understand how you could do this. This level of craft is impossible.”
“And yet,” Professor Harrison said with a smirk.
“Professor,” Tiana said. “What does it look like when no one is looking?”
They discussed the artifact and the brothers who found it all afternoon. Tiana and Desdemona had an endless supply of questions. Professor Harrison was patient at first, but eventually grew irritable and began answering their questions tersely.
“I don’t have time to give you a graduate level lecture on the mechanisms of cursed jewelry,” he snapped. “Are we done here? I still have papers to grade before I leave on my trip and I’d rather not spend my holiday working.”
“We’re done here,” Tiana nodded. In a well-practiced move she whipped her wand from its sheath and uttered the words of Willoughby’s Restful Slumber while tapping Harrison’s forehead.
His defensive wards tried to block her spell. They sparked and glowed and collapsed.
Des jumped to her feet. “What the hell was that?”
“Sleep spell. A strong one,” Tiana said, rubbing circulation back into her fingers. The shell of defensive spells had a bite to it. Her hands were numb and cold from the blowback. “My dad uses it on civilians sometimes, when they get in the way. I don’t think he knows that I know it. When I was in Harrison’s office I got a chance to look at the defenses he’d erected.”
Cho snickered at the word erected.
Tiana tried to fight off the blushing heat rising in her cheeks. “Anyway. Long story short, he wasn’t protected about this and will you please help me get him up into bed.”
“Is this a threesome thing?” Des asked. “Because I am pretty sure I am into it.”
“No,” Tiana said. “Or at least not right now.” She circled her arms around Harrison’s chest. “Get his legs, Des. We’ve exhausted our avenues of research. We need to move on to the next part of the hunt.”
“Couldn’t we do more about the broach? That thing really fascinates me.” She grabbed the professor’s ankles and they hauled him up and off the couch.
“If Harrison couldn’t figure it out, what hope do we have? Especially with the library closed. Unless you want to break in?”
Des’s eyes went wide with fear. “You don’t fuck with the library. Not ever.”
“Then let’s get this guy into bed.”
Cho tried to cast a lightness spell, but it bounced off the shields on Harrison and made all of the books in the house float like dust in a sunbeam.
Tiana wrote runes of strength on her arms and Des’s arms, but when they touched Harrison the runes steamed off their bodies.
So they hauled and huffed and puffed and dragged him up two flights of stairs to the third floor bedroom after pausing on the second floor to recon for his bedroom and finding only offices and storage.
“The good news is, he doesn’t have a girlfriend.” Des smiled brightly.
The bedroom occupied the entire top floor and was dominated by a king size four poster bed. Each post of the bed was marked with magical writing, in different languages, of solid gold. It had been worked into the wood itself and provided protection against a thousand different enemies and spells.
Tiana whistled as she examined it. “This bed must be the safest place on Earth. I can’t even recognize a third of these things but it should protect against mind control, insect bites, snoring, shapeshifters, Night Hags, Daymares, indigestion, muscle fatigue and vampires.”
Desdemona Cho snorted. “There haven’t been vampires in a hundred and fifty years.”
“This bed must be old then,” Tiana said. “All of the writing was done at the same time.” She lifted Harrison into his bed. “But whatever is haunting him—it’s not anything listed here.”
“It must be old,” Des said. “Very, very old.”
Tiana nodded. “Or new.”
Cho unlaced Harrison’s shoes and tossed them onto the floor. Then she tugged off his socks.
“What are you doing?”
“Removing his socks. Who sleeps in socks?” Cho was incredulous.
“I do. I always sleep in socks.”
“I assume you sleep in your clothes, in case you need to hunt something while you’re sleeping.” Cho’s voice was wry.
Tiana thought about it. “Only sometimes.”
5
The plan was to watch Harrison as he
slept and then, when the ghost or haunt or demon or whatever it was appeared, to observe it and then scare it away. Once they knew what they were up against they could strategize and the next night they’d be able to defeat it.
“So it’s a good plan?” Des asked. “I only ask because I’ve never done this sort of thing before.”
It was Tiana’s turn to smile. “Is the big bad Desdemona Cho afraid of a little spookums?”
They were sitting on the floor in Harrison’s bedroom, eating a picnic of the food that scrounged from his fridge.
“I can’t believe every delivery place is closed. It’s not even Christmas yet.” Tiana’s plate held pickles, sliced apples, and an unidentifiable cheese that smelled like butter and grass.
“Everyone deserves a holiday,” Cho replied. Her plate was mostly olives and canned peaches. It was pretty clear that Harrison had been putting off buying groceries before his trip.
“It’s not a good plan,” Tiana said. Cho froze and looked up at her slowly in an immensely satisfying way. “We need more research. More recon. We’re going in as close to blind as possible. The key tonight is observation. We stay out of the way. We stay hidden. Unless we think the entity is going to harm the professor.”
“This stuff scares the pants off me,” Cho whispered, glancing back at Harrison’s sleeping form. The good professor snored gently but otherwise didn’t move even a toe. How many days had he been avoiding sleep?
“But you’re the best witch around. Everyone knows that.”
“Do you know how much dark magic experience I have? None. Zero. There was one day in my first year seminar that they brought in a creature—a Svirfneblin?—I was so freaked that I skipped that day.”
“They’re harmless though,” Tiana said. “They just steal gold and hoard it. They might knock someone down, but that’s about it. My dad and I found a clan of them in Saskatchewan once, in this small town. I think I was about seven?”
“I didn’t even know about magic when I was seven,” Cho interjected.
“The Neblins have a religious belief that gold is the heart of the earth spirit, and all gold must be returned to the earth. They steal gold coins and watches and jewelry, melt it down, and pour it into cracks in the rock.” Tiana took a bite of the cheese, winced, and spit it out. “They were tunneling up under banks and homes and robbing the town blind. And this was a poor town. They couldn’t even afford to fix their foundations where the Neblins broke through.”
“Did you kill them?” Cho’s voice was small now. She was fascinated. Something clicked for Tiana, for the first time. Most kids didn’t ride around with their parents, fighting monsters and saving people. Other people didn’t know—not really—about the things in the darkness or the even worse things in the daylight. Maybe others would like to hear her stories, too?
Tiana shook her head. “My dad wanted to. He’s not a witch, y’know? Just a normal human with a passion. His first response to any creature is to kill it and figure out what it was after. But my mom was there, she traveled with us a lot back then, to watch over me I guess. And she intervened. She took me and went to meet with the Neblins’ clan leader, their Kezar. He was this gnarled and bent little man, with a nose like a raisin and a chin that jutted out far from his face. He wore an old teddy bear skin with a belt and carried a maglight for a staff. I don’t know what my mom said, but she convinced them to move into an old gold mine not so far away. And the townsfolk agreed to bring tribute, every solstice to keep them out of town and in exchange the gardens in town were pest free. There were no slugs or rats or moles or mosquitos. The Neblins ate them all.”
“Sounds like it all worked out,” Des said. Her voice was heavy with awe.
“My dad didn’t like it. Mostly because we had to drive the Neblins to the cave in our van and they all insisted on coming at once.”
“How many were there?”
“Fifty,” Tiana laughed. “It was like being stuffed into a closet with muppets. And my mom still goes there every solstice, to make sure the town does its duty by the Neblins.”
“Your mom sounds really nice.”
“She can be. She tries to be. It’s honestly not her nature though. She comes from a long line of the bad kind of witch. She’s trying to do better, to be better.”
Cho grew quiet then. Everyone knew the story about her parents. They’d been researchers and explorers. They’d opened a portal to the wrong place and something on the other side reached through with searing tentacles and tore them apart. Cho was twelve when it happened.
What could she say to her friend? Tiana didn’t know. The stakes were so high—one wrong word and their friendship could crumble and crash. She knew it. They’d talked more in the last two days than they had all semester. Before they’d been friends. But now they were becoming friends.
Tiana reached over and took Cho’s hand and gave it a light squeeze. It was all she could do.
Cho smiled at her then with no hint of wickedness or sarcasm. She blinked away tears and sighed. Then she said, “So how into Professor Hot Stuff are you? On a scale of one to oh my god you’re obsessed with him?”
“It’s that obvious?”
“Girl.”
“Really?”
“Girl.”
“Do you think he knows?”
“Girl. He’s an empath.”
Tiana buried her face in her hands. “This is so embarrassing. I never get like this. What’s wrong with me?”
Cho narrowed her eyes. “Are you a virgin?”
“What? No. I’ve done stuff. Mostly with boys.” Her cheeks burned. “But I’ve never had someone special. A boyfriend or whatever.”
“Just random hookups?”
“I guess.”
“You slut,” Cho laughed and bounced an olive off of Tiana’s nose.
Tiana sat stone faced. “I can’t believe you just booped me with an olive. You know of course, this means war.” She picked up the half-chewed glob of cheese.
“You wouldn’t dare!”
“She who dares, wins,” Tiana hissed. She flicked the stinky cheese glob and it flew through the air with marvelous slowness before splatting wetly and sticking directly in the middle of Desdemona Cho’s forehead.
The cheese stuck there and held. “What the hell kind of cheese is this?” Des said. “Why do academics eat such nasty ass food?” She grabbed a napkin and wiped the ooze off her face.
“What about you? You ever have a—and I can’t believe I’m using this word unironically—a relationship?”
Des laughed loudly then covered her mouth and glanced back at the professor. “First year I dated Sean Colt for like two weeks? I’ve had a few hookups but as my rep has grown, everyone has become afraid to talk to me.”
“That’s silly,” Tiana said. “You’re really nice.”
“To you.” Desdemona’s voice held fire. Her eyes were deadly serious. “I’m nice to you. I truly believe it is fucked up that we have all this power, all this magic, and yet we still have poverty and pollution and oppressive social structures and wars. You exist outside all of that, Tats. That’s why we can be friends.”
A pause stretched out between them.
“Tats?” Tiana asked, cocking an eyebrow.
“For Tatiana?” Cho frowned. “You don’t like it? You keep calling me Des and so I thought I needed a nickname for you. Whatever. It’s fine. I’m workshopping it.”
Tiana was about to double down on teasing her friend, when a chill rolled into the room. Her exhalations hung in the air like little clouds. The windows groaned and strained as a thick sheet of ice covered them from the inside.
“What the f—” Desdemona began, but she was cut off as Tiana clamped a hand over her mouth and pulled her friend hard against her.
Tiana slid her wand slowly from its sheath and drew a complex shield of runes in the air, hanging them on her and Cho like a party planner festooning a tree with tinsel. It was Ansheh’s Hunt, an old and powerful tool to conceal a hunter from t
heir prey. As long as they didn’t move, speak, breathe too much, or startle, it should hide them from whatever was coming.
It was the first spell her father ever taught her. She’d been five—much too young to learn magic by any reasonable standard—but in their line of work it was necessary. It was one of three spells her father could perform as a non-witch and it’d taken him seven years of practice to learn it.
Tiana mastered it in days.
It saved her that night.
Ribbons of mist reached in through the street-facing iced-over window. The ribbons writhed in the air, flailing about wildly, touching everything. And wherever they touched, they left black frost behind. One touch of those on flesh and it was frostbite, gangrene, amputation. As slowly as possible Tiana put her other arm around Des and hugged her tightly. She wanted to cover as much of her friend’s body with hers as possible. If anyone got hurt, it should be her.
The misty tendrils stretched to the bed and ceased flailing. They seemed to sniff the air like serpents. They extended from the window to Harrison now and it would be so easy if she had her blades to hurl one and cut the head from the creature.
But she left her weapons at home.
This was pure recon. A fact-finding mission.
Cho squirmed in her grasp so Tiana hugged her more fiercely.
The icy tendrils probed around the bed. The wards on the bedposts glowed bright and then brighter still. The magic shields were keeping the thing at bay. It wasn’t going to win tonight. It’d return and push harder tomorrow, but tonight the professor would sleep safely.
The end of the tendrils pulsed and swelled, becoming spherical. They looked like white grapes on a vine, dripping with frozen mist. The bulbs peeled open and Tiana flinched when she saw mouths inside. Not human mouths—the lips were the wrong shape—but mouths nonetheless with teeth and tongues all white as snow.
The mouths took a breath in and the tendrils of mist shivered like guitar strings and an awful cacophony shook the room. A whispered song issued forth from the tendril-mouths and it was the most wrong thing Tiana had ever heard.
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